Prerequisities

SlipStream is migrating towards a micro-server architecture and consists of a number of individual services that work together. The front-end services are stateless; all of the persistent state is stored in separate databases (currently Elasticsearch and HSQLDB). Many administrators are familiar with this type of architecture and will be comfortable running the necessary services and databases.

Software Requirements

The software is tested, packaged, and supported for CentOS 7 systems. The packages should install and run correctly on any RHEL 7 compatible system.

The software itself should build and run on any Unix-like system (internally we use MacOS as a development platform), although some changes may be needed for integration with the operating system’s service management infrastructure.

Hardware Requirements

The hardware requirements of SlipStream are modest. Any modern, multicore, server-class machine should run the SlipStream services without problems. We recommend a machine with a minimum of 4 CPU cores and 8 GB of RAM. A machine with 20-50 GB of disk space should be sufficient for initial use.

As with any service, the resource requirements for the server will increase with the number of users and with the number of system deployments. Use a larger machine if you expect particularly large scale or intense use of the service. For a production system, you should strongly consider using a separate cluster for the Elasticsearch and Zookeeper services.

Networking Requirements

SlipStream is available through a web-proxy on the standard HTTPS (443) port. The proxy redirects all traffic on the HTTP (80) port to the HTTPS port. Consequently, firewalls on the machine or site must allow access to the HTTPS port from the users’ machines; they may also allow access to the HTTP port.

To administer and monitor the machine running the SlipStream service, you may also want to have the SSH port (22) and the Nagios NRPE port (5666) open to your administrators’ machines.

For an initial test deployment, the Elasticsearch database is deployed on the same machine as the other servers. In this case, no additional ports need to be opened to the outside world. Production deployments should have the Elasticsearch database deployed on separate machines. In this case, the Elasticsearch ports (9200 and 9300) will need to be opened to the machine(s) running the other SlipStream services.

The configured SlipStream connectors act as clients of the correponding cloud service provider. Consequently, the server must also have outgoing access to the underlying cloud service endpoints. The ports used vary depending on the cloud service provider.

For any cloud service provider that does not support a virtual machine contextualization mechanism, the server requires direct SSH access (port 22) to virtual machines within those clouds.

Cloud Requirements

SlipStream is a cloud deployment engine and requires access to at least one supported cloud infrastucture. See the list of supported clouds and conditions on the associated cloud connector to select the cloud(s) you will be making available through your SlipStream instance.

You must have at least one valid account on each cloud you want to support to verify the SlipStream configuration for those clouds.